Cellular Automata & Moore Neighborhood
Cellular Automata and the Moore Neighborhood smoothing algorithm are two simple AI implementations that work extremely well together in order to generate 2D or 3D tile- or cube-based levels for games with great flexibility. My goal with this blog post is to help you understand the power of the two algorithms when they work together and how you could possibly use them in your own game. Keep reading as I will also provide helpful resources from other sources if you want to explore these algorithms further. Cellular Automata is used to generate a set of random level data with a fill limit. You can tell the formula that you want 40 percent of your level to be terrain which will leave 60 percent of it open. In many of my examples I left the value somewhere between the default of 50 percent and 45 percent. You don't want to adjust this value too much as the Moore Neighborhood algorithm will do most of the terrain forming (smoothing). The Moore Neighborhood algorithm is a smoothing